Make Sure Your Data is Not Held Hostage

Using the services of a 3rd party service provider is good – as I’ve written many times. But one thing you really must be careful of is your data being held hosted.
Maybe your bill is not paid. Maybe you want to break your contract. Maybe their service goes down. In these scenarios the provider could choose to hold your data hostage.
Computer World writesKruskol, who owns MJK Public Relations in Van Nuys, Calif., has been spending time lately trying to solve his home business-based voice-over-IP phone service problem.
Kruskol hasn’t been able to use the VoIP service arranged recently with TeleBlend for eight days, even though TeleBlend announced that an outage to its 60,000 customers was fixed last Wednesday, Kruskol said today.
“Service has not been restored to everyone,” an angry Kruskol said.
There’s two things that can help:
Really check and ensure you have contracts that not only work for the provider but also work for YOU.
Secondly have a back up plan. If your data is backed up and your data is held hostage, you an always switch the data to another provider or bring it in-house.
I’m sure you don’t want to think about not having access to your data, but just in case – be prepared.

One thought on “Make Sure Your Data is Not Held Hostage”

In the old days we used to advise against using a hosted backup service, though I must say they’ve come a long ways. In many cases one’s friendly neighborhood VAR is now acting as a service provider and handling remote backup services for their small/midsized business customers. This is certainly a load off one’s mind: if your VAR is your backup service, and they can’t get your data back, I’d be very surprised!